Thursday, March 5, 2015

Significance of Learning by Doing

With the explosion of technological possibilities, it appears that 21st century human beings are smarter than the earlier generations. It is not so. They (even the prehistoric tribes) were equally intelligent like us and have faced day today challenges as we do.  The only difference could be that the content of our issues/challenges are different.

We boast of knowledge accumulation in various fields. But, what is that hinders business growth when there is plenty of knowledge and information around? The converging answer is; rarely do people set out for executing an action or applying knowledge. The corollary of the statement is rarely we gather knowledge by doing.

In our business facilitation, we follow the principle of 'being aware before doing before knowing'. We propose to suspend knowledge until you do (while tackling wicked problems). We are struggling to cajole our clients to take action on the insights we generate during our workshops. Everybody agrees about the insights and the desired destiny, but no one takes initiatives, even the simple ones.    

The essence of learning is that those who are aware of the exact here-and-now issues and the farther impact of the action, are likely to take action. Raising such an awareness among the key members of the organisation is not easy. We need to design or perhaps invent methodologies to bring out a collective awareness about the common goal. In the end, we console ourselves that, we are getting better  and moving towards gaining shared understanding and execution among our client's team. Perfection is yet to be reached.  

We constantly take efforts to install a culture in the organization  for taking action on the insights developed, and  create opportunities to reflect  and review on their actions. Doing with awareness and reflecting on the actions, promises an ability to adapt, cope with, manage and prepare for uncertainties and change. Our focus on 'doing before knowing' also ensures that the organisational members complete learning cycles by doing, reflecting, re-framing and applying on the business issues. One of the pioneering practitioner once said " there is no learning without doing and no action without learning". How true it is?

contributed by Sasikanth R Prabhu